The number of airplane passengers has increased steadily over the past decades, while the cost of travelling by airplane is becoming ever more affordable. Airport providers compete to attract airlines and passengers not only through costs but also through convenience facilities and modern airport hence provide a variety of stores, restaurants and other user-convenience facilities.
As a result of the ever-increasing amount of air traffic, airports (sometime even referred to as “non-places”) tend to become bigger, and most major international airports comprise several terminals and a vast number of departure gates, wherein the departure gates of each terminal are usually distributed along several so-called fingers, concourses or piers. One consequence of the growth of airports is that passengers are required to walk large distances, and that passengers are demanded to navigate through airport terminals by following signs to the appropriate departure gates.
It is well-known that departure gates may change with short notice and that flight delays may be announced with equal short notice, and passengers are hence also required to keep themselves up-to-date via monitors within the airport terminal.
Flights are frequently delayed by passengers who arrive late at the departure gate after having been lost within the airport terminal. From time to time, such delays are significant, in case a passenger's luggage has to be located and off-loaded. From the departing passengers' point of view, gate changes and delays incur stress and lead to waste of time, in particular under circumstances where a passenger finds himself/herself waiting at a gate for an extended period of time, from which the passenger could have benefitted in a lounge or shopping area at the airport in question. From the airport providers' point of view, it is generally desirable that waiting passengers spend extended waiting time at restaurants, shops, lounges etc. rather than at the departure gates.
The present invention aims at turning passengers referred to as “late-gaters” and “early-gaters” into “on-time gaters”, i.e. to ensure that passengers arrive at their designated departure gate at an appropriate point in time. An “early gater” is a lost customer of airport shops and restaurants, and a “late-gater” can cause flight departure delays, which in turn frequently lead to loss of slot time at arriving airports, thereby increasing operational costs of airlines and compromising gate efficiency at the airport in question.
Once the passenger has been guided, preferably on time, to the gate, the boarding of aircrafts often takes more time than strictly necessary. Given that most aircrafts only provide one access door, or at most two access doors, and that encouragements for passengers in the aircraft's front rows to defer embarkation until passengers in the back rows have boarded often are disregarded, a need exists for expediting boarding of aircrafts.
The present invention aims at alleviating these inconveniences and minimizing passenger hassle occurring as a consequence of gate changes and delays and to improve passenger experience through convenient guidance to individually relevant services. It is a further object of embodiments of the invention to allow airport providers to improve services through relevant monitoring and information gathering of passenger behaviour.